> Language designers often make vague arguments about the “simplicity” or “intuitiveness” of language features, without ever saying what they mean by these terms, or testing whether these claims are true.<p>Anecdotally the designer of Ruby, if in doubt, asked his little daughter what looked simpler / easier to understand.<p>The post skimmed by the issue of polyglot programmers. I used to work with C, Java and Perl, now with Ruby, Python, Elixir, JavaScript. There is also PHP, which I made some money with but I never really cared much about.<p>What happens when working with so many languages in maybe as many different projects is that the amount of context switches increases. It's like going back to a project after six months but it happens the next week. This makes it easier to spot both the weaknesses in my code (why did I call that variable so?) and the weaknesses in the programming languages (why did they do that when everybody else is doing that other thing which is so better?)<p>I could give examples and make everybody angry because every language has its share of problems :-)<p>A side effect is that I tend to write simpler and dumber code, because I have to understand it when I come back. The clever features of languages are tempting but I use them only for those special cases when everything else wouldn't do. There are (un)surprisingly very few of them.